{"id":1550,"date":"2020-02-24T13:32:26","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T18:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/?p=1550"},"modified":"2020-02-24T13:32:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T18:32:26","slug":"is-ford-really-suffering-or-are-the-pundits-just-herding-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/2020\/02\/is-ford-really-suffering-or-are-the-pundits-just-herding-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Ford really suffering, or are the pundits just herding again?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ford dominates pickup trucks, commercial vans, and police cars; one wonders why anyone else even bothers to try to compete with them in vans and squads. Their dominance of the pickup market has become legendary and to some degree self-fulfilling: because they make so many, (unlike GM) under the same brand, they can have a huge amount of different varieties.<\/p>\n

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Yet, word on the street is that Ford is in some trouble. Their $1.7 billion quarterly loss sent the stock tumbling, and analysts haven’t seen much upside lately. The stock has kept falling.<\/p>\n

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2020 Ford F-Series Super Duty<\/p><\/div>\n

There are some concerns about Jim Farley, from Marketing, the new chief operating officer (COO). He is replacing Joe Hinrichs, who had\u00a0a strong manufacturing and dealership background. That may work out well, but chances are, it won\u2019t; Farley\u2019s main claim to fame was creating Scion for Toyota.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, to some degree, Ford’s failure is actually the result of pundits enjoying a good story rather than being a true financial issue. The company enjoys extremely strong loyalty among its fleet buyers; nobody else could have replaced big engines with smaller turbos, done FWD-based police cars, and sold an aluminum-bodied pickup in massive quantities. Chrysler may have beaten Ford to turbos and front-drive squads by a couple of decades, but they didn’t gain much acceptance; when Ford does something, the fleet buyers instantly pronounce it genius (after calling it folly if Chrysler or GM tried it).<\/p>\n

Even the loss wasn\u2019t really a loss. Ford didn\u2019t make a large profit, but they charged $2.2 billion to pension liabilities.<\/p>\n

\"2020<\/p>\n

Ford had a disastrous launch of the new Explorer, but the company has recovered from awful launches before. The first years of the Taurus were marked by transmission failures, catalytic converter failures, and engine problems. The first years of the Focus set a record for recalls. The Taurus became America\u2019s best selling car and the Focus was a massive hit even while it was being recalled over and over. The Contour had dismal reviews, was quickly updated, and became a hot seller, albeit in the 1990s. In short, a terrible launch doesn’t kill a product.<\/p>\n

Part of the shortfall, too, is the cost of closing down older cars and shifting production to crossovers in a market which changed very quickly. Fiat Chrysler already paid for that, and Toyota is doing it more gradually. Ford has made a clever investment in Rivian to secure the future at relatively low cost; they can make an electric F-150 without having to bother engineering and developing it, by transplanting their existing parts and designs from the real F-150 onto the Rivian chassis. (Likewise, if Rivian succeeds, which Amazon has practically guaranteed, Ford will get a share of its success.) The source of the \u201cMustang-inspired\u201d Mach-E may be Rivian or it may be Ford, but it\u2019s certainly grabbed headlines.<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s future may be bright; it might not. But usually these stories are a bit overplayed, and it would be foolish to count Ford out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ford dominates pickup trucks, commercial vans, and police cars; one wonders why anyone else even bothers to try to compete with them in vans and squads. Their dominance of the pickup market has become legendary and to some degree self-fulfilling: because they make so many, (unlike GM) under the same brand, they can have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,70,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/2020superduty-snowplow5.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}